Things to do
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Esztergom Basilica
Hungary's largest church stands on a hill above the Danube, with Slovakia on the far bank. Work began in 1822 and the upper church was dedicated in 1856, with Liszt conducting his Gran Mass at the ceremony. An earlier red marble chapel was dismantled into some sixteen hundred pieces and rebuilt inside the new nave. Stairs to the cupola start down in the crypt.
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Fő tér
Roads from Buda, Visegrád and the Pilis hills meet at a triangular square of painted baroque merchant houses. At its centre stands the Merchants' Cross, raised by the Serbian trading guild in 1763 in thanks for a plague that passed the town by. The Blagoveštenska church on the square keeps a gilded iconostasis behind a plain facade.
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Hungarian Open Air Museum
Some sixty-three hectares of hillside north of the town hold relocated farmhouses, barns, churches and workshops, grouped into eight regions of historic Hungary and furnished as they stood between the mid eighteenth and mid twentieth centuries. A narrow gauge train runs between the distant units. The site shuts for winter and opens from spring into early November, and half a day is a realistic visit.
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Margit Kovács Ceramic Museum
Ceramics by Margit Kovács fill a baroque house on a lane off the main square, built as a salt office and later a trading house. She gave the collection to the county in 1972 and it opened to visitors the following year: over three hundred figural works, saints, village women and folk tales in glazed clay. The rooms are small and the visit runs to about an hour.
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Visegrád Castle
Béla IV raised a triangular fortress on the ridge above the Danube in the years after the Mongol invasion, and the Hungarian royal insignia were kept inside it until 1526. Walls and towers survive in part, with the bend of the river laid out below. A road climbs from the village to the gate, and the footpath up through the woods is steep.
